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4 Ways to Travel and Work Effectively

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4 Ways to Travel and Work Effectively

Travel and Work in FrankfurtGuten Tag!

Today I’m writing you from beautiful downtown Frankfurt as part of a working vacation. Pretty sweet gig, right? It should go without saying, though, that neat experiences that involve travel and work like this are only possible through the effective use of modern business telecommunications like Dash from VirtualPBX. Well, that and a whole lot of planning, too, and it’s in that area that we’re going to focus today.

Get Out of Town, Not out of Synch

Just as the right telecommunications tools aren’t useful when the network they run on is faulty, having advanced hosted systems can’t correct for poor planning among teammates, either. To be clear, the team as a whole will often have to make a few accommodations for someone who is going satellite, but the bulk of the preparations and concessions need to rightfully come from the traveler himself. With that in mind, here are a few considerations or anyone who is contemplating any working travel.

Research

As I’m often keen to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” meaning that there are bound to be complications you couldn’t have anticipated with your coming trip. Mitigate the impact and frequency of these hiccups by learning as much in advance about your destination as possible. Everything from which credit card to get the best exchange rate through to are there any national holidays that you’re unfamiliar with occurring during your visit. The more you can know about how to operate in and navigate through your host country, the better prepared you’ll be to handle the bumps in the road.

Coordinate and Accommodate

Frankfurt is 9 hours time difference from Silicon Valley, that type of time disparity requires some horse trading to get everyone on the same schedule for any standing deadlines, meetings, and milestones that are scheduled during your trip. It’s important to try and find opportunities to reschedule things wherever possible, but remember that ultimately, if there is a hard scheduling block that can’t be worked around then maybe you’ll have to forgo that immersive cooking class you were eyeing.

Plan Your Day

This seems simple at first because, like many professionals, you probably already have a fairly good idea of how most of your days will go. There has never been a more important time to have your time work for you than when you’re abroad, however. Utilizing some of the downtime that is integrated into travel is your best bet for harvesting some low-hanging fruit. Time in transit, layovers, and if you happen to be suffering from some wicked jetlag and find yourself at 0200 looking for something to do are all good opportunities to identify tasks that you expect to fill these various gaps in your schedule. Doing this frees some of the more flexible hours of your day to be filled with whatever must-hit item on your tourist hit-list happens to be next.

Enjoy Yourself

Which leads me to possibly the most important part of the strategies for successfully conducting a working vacation, and that is the vacation part. Remember that you will likely miss a few opportunities to fully embrace your time away from home, and you’ll likely be working beyond what you’d typically expect to during your routine grind, so make sure that all of that is worth it in the end.

By leveraging the advanced business communications tools provided to you from a hosted telephone system like Dash, and apportioning your time according to your schedule as much as you can, you’ll be freed up to enjoy both a productive work week and a rich and full holiday, no matter where you’re headed.

Auf wiedersehen!

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